Betty MacDonald Fan Club. Join fans of the beloved writer Betty MacDonald (1907-58). The original Betty MacDonald Fan Club and literary Society. Welcome to Betty MacDonald Fan Club and Betty MacDonald Society - the official Betty MacDonald Fan Club Website with members in 40 countries.
Betty MacDonald, the author of The Egg and I and the Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle Series is beloved all over the world. Don't miss Wolfgang Hampel's Betty MacDonald biography and his very witty interviews on CD and DVD!

Friday, December 2, 2016

Betty MacDonald, Gammy, the sultan and the salesman

Hello 'Pussy', this is Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle. Your strongest allegiance is
to your own

cupidity.

Should I remain in bed, leave my country or fight against the dragon?

( see also the story by Wolfgang Hampel, ' Betty MacDonald: Nothing more to say ' )

December will be a very exciting month for Betty MacDonald fan club fans not only because of Xmas.

Britta and her Betty MacDonald fan club team are working on the new Betty MacDonald fan club item 'Christmas with Gammy'.

Betty MacDonald's unique Grandmother
Gammy will entertain you with very exciting and witty stories incld.
golden memories and comments of Betty MacDonald and her family - never
published before.

A new golden Betty MacDonald fan club treasure!
You can order our new Betty MacDonald and Alison Bard Burnett CD and DVD!
DVD
and CD are different. You can see Betty MacDonald, her sister Alison
Bard Burnett and other family members and friends in front of the camera
for the first time!
We can offer you new wonderful Betty
MacDonald Fan Club Items and a new Betty MacDonald and Alison Bard
Burnett CD and DVD.

More
exciting news about Betty MacDonald's filmed interview will come soon.
Anne
Elizabeth Campbell Bard was born March 26, 1907 in Boulder, Colorado,
the second child of Sydney and Darsie Bard. Betsy and her three sisters
and brother had an adventurous, somewhat unconventional childhood owing
to the strong and creative personalities of their parents and Darsie's
mother, "Gammy," and the many lessons in independence they survived
gracefully. ( see story Betty and Gammy written by Wolfgang Hampel
published by Betty MacDonald Fan Club and Interviews with
Betty MacDonald and her sister Alison Bard published on CD/DVD . The interviews on CD and DVD are different )
When Betsy was 12 her father died of pneumonia, but the
family's strong relationships and optimism remained intact through this
sorrow and the ensuing financial trials.
Betsy (who later preferred
the nickname Betty) said that for the Bard children, there were really
only two household rules: "We were expected to be polite and to tell the
truth, no matter how appalling. "Apart from that, the Bard children did
as they pleased and went forth into the world with well-defined
personalities, acutely-developed senses of humor and adventure, and a
remarkable zest for life.
Betty married at 20 and went to live on a
chicken ranch in the Olympic mountains. Her experiences there are
chronicled in her first book, The Egg and I . ( see books The Kettles'
Million Dollar Egg, The Egg and Betty, The Tragic end of Robert Eugene
Heskett by Wolfgang Hampel published by BMC)
Life in such
isolation and hardship palled after 4 years and she returned with her
two small daughters to her Seattle family just as the Depression hit.
The amazing stories of their survival and triumph are related in Anybody
Can Do Anything. Betty and her family had a wonderful friend who
supported them during this very difficult time.
( see Betty and Mike
by Wolfgang Hampel published by BMC and Wolfgang Hampel's
interview with Alison Bard published by BMC )
Alison Bard tells some delightful treasure stories about this wonderful friend.
But
Betty's career as a businesswoman was cut short when she contracted
pulmonary tuberculosis and entered Firlands, an endowed sanitorium north
of Seattle. Lying flat on one's back for 8 1/2 months doesn't seem the
stuff of which humor can be made, but Betty did indeed spin gold out of
straw, in The Plague and I.
( see Betty MacDonald's illness written
by Wolfgang Hampel and published by BMC and comments of Betty
MacDonald's family and friends incl. Betty MacDonald's wonderful friend Kimi )
After her recovery, Betty married Donald MacDonald and
they moved their family to Vashon Island, leading an idyllic and
interesting existence as portrayed in Onions in the Stew. While on
Vashon Betty also wrote her works for children: the Mrs. Piggle Wiggle series and Nancy and Plum.
Betty and her husband bought a ranch
near Carmel, but illness forced her to move back to Seattle. She died of
cancer at the age of 50 on February 7, 1958. ( see Betty MacDonald's
illness by Wolfgang Hampel, published by BMC and Wolfgang Hampel's
interview with Alison Bard, published by BMC )
Why is
Betty's writing so beloved among so many people all over the world? The
first and most obvious reason is that it's hilarious - sharp, sometimes
irreverent. vivid and unexpected. Betty manages to find humor
everywhere: on the early morning streetcar, in a hospital ward, in a
home with two cranky adolescents, in job situations from farm work to
secretarial duties. To read Betty's writing is to laugh -- often out
loud, in public places, whether you want to or not. She has a terrific
eye for the absurd and can paint a striking and side-splitting word
picture in a few succinct strokes.
But Betty fans also love her
optimism, her strength, her intense love for her family, her times of
self-doubt, and the zest with which she approaches all of life and
relishes simple pleasures.( see many comments of Betty MacDonald Fans in
books, stories and interviews with Betty MacDonald's family and
friends published by BMC )
Betty's indomitable sister
Mary Bard, whom we encounter in all four books but meet most vividly in
Anybody Can Do Anything, also went on to write (her first book is
dedicated to Betty, "Who Egged Me On"). Mary's books, The Doctor Wears
Three Faces, Forty-Odd, Just Be Yourself, and the children's series Best
Friends, are also much beloved by Betty fans who find themselves
quickly becoming Mary fans as well. ( see Wolfgang Hampel's interviews
with Alison Bard)

Alison Bard Burnett shares the most interesting stories about Mary,
Betty and the Bard family. CD and DVD interviews are different ones.

I agree with Betty in this very witty Betty MacDonald story Betty MacDonald: Nothing more to say by Wolfgang Hampel.

I
can't imagine to live in a country with him as so-called elected
President although there are very good reasons to remain there to fight
against these brainless politics.

Now that Trump is going to destroy trade, cause millions of jobs to
be lost, and cause the US dollar to collapse, there's very little reason
for the coasts to remain part of a wholly dysfunctional, racist,
backward, and inward-looking nation.Meanwhile Canada is a country of liberal principles in which people
are educated, less superstitious/religious, healthier, and happier. If
California, Oregon, and Washington hold successful ballot initiatives
over the next 24 months there's no reason why by 2020 we shouldn't have
the United States of Canada and the Backward States of America emerging
as two distinct nations. The former will be forward-looking, open,
dynamic, and meritocratic while the latter will be backward-looking,
closed, racist, stagnant, and based entirely around the politics of
influence. In the end it may well be the case that California shows the way, not
to a Democratic electoral victory at some distant and implausible time
in the future when the rest of the USA is less backward, racist,
ignorant, and insular but rather to a future in which educated
open-minded people decide to leave those who can't be saved in order to
get on with the serious business of building a better world.

Don't miss the article below, please.

The most difficult case in Mrs.Piggle-Wiggle's career

Hello 'Pussy', this is Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle.

You
took calls from foreign leaders on unsecured phone lines, without
consultung the State Department. We have to change your silly behaviour
with a new Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle cure. I know you are the most difficult
case in my career - but we have to try everything.......................

Besides him ( by the way the First Lady's place ) his 10 year old son was bored to death and listened to this 'exciting' victory speech.

The old man could be his great-grandfather.

The
boy was very tired and thought: I don't know what this old guy is
talking about. Come on and finish it, please. I'd like to go to bed.Dear 'great-grandfather' continued and praised the Democratic candidate.

This
is incredible! I'll You get what you pay/vote for and Trump is the
epitome of this ideology. America I won't feel bad for you because you
don't need my sympathy for what's coming but I am genuinely scared for
you. 'Forgive them lord for they know not who they do' or maybe they do
but just don't care about their future generations who will suffer for
this long after the culprits have passed away.

In 2006, Palin obtained a passport[88] and in 2007 traveled for the first time outside of North America on a trip to Kuwait. There she visited the Khabari Alawazem Crossing at the Kuwait–Iraq border and met with members of the Alaska National Guard at several bases.[89] On her return journey she visited injured soldiers in Germany.[90]That's the reason why very intelligent and brilliant Sarah Palin knows the World very well. Sarah and ' Pussygate ' will rule America and the World - what a couple.

If so would you be so kind to share them?

Our next Betty MacDonald fan club project is a collection of these unique dedications.

If you
share your dedication from your Betty MacDonald - and Mary Bard Jensen
collection you might be the winner of our new Betty MacDonald fan club
items.

Thank you so much in advance for your support.

Thank you so much for sending us your favourite Betty MacDonald quote.

More info are coming soon.

Wolfgang
Hampel's Betty MacDonald and Ma and Pa Kettle biography and Betty
MacDonald interviews have fans in 40 countries. I'm one of their many devoted fans.

Many Betty MacDonald - and Wolfgang Hampel fans are very interested in a Wolfgang Hampel CD and DVD with his
very funny poems and stories.

We are going to publish new Betty MacDonald essays on Betty MacDonald's gardens and nature in Washington State.Tell us the names of this mysterious couple please and you can win a very new Betty MacDonald documentary.

The series premiered on September 3,
1951, the same day as "Search for Tomorrow," and ended on August 1,
1952.

Although it did well in the ratings, it had difficulty
attracting a steady sponsor. This episode features Betty Lynn (later
known for her work on "The Andy Griffith Show") as Betty MacDonald, John
Craven as Bob MacDonald, Doris Rich as Ma Kettle, and Frank Twedell as
Pa Kettle.

Betty MacDonald fan club exhibition will be fascinating with the international book editions and letters by Betty MacDonald.I can't wait to see the new Betty MacDonald documentary.

The sultan and the salesman

Turkey’s Islamist president is embracing Donald Trump

But Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s enthusiasm may not last long

IN JUNE, a few months after Donald Trump, then a candidate for the
Republican nomination, called for a ban on Muslim immigration, Turkey’s
Islamist leader objected. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan demanded that
Mr Trump’s name be removed from Trump Towers in Istanbul. “The ones who
put that brand on their building should remove it immediately,” he said.Mr Erdogan appears to have changed his mind, both about the towers
and about the man whose name appears on them. Although polls show that
most Turks would have preferred to see Hillary Clinton as America’s new
president, Mr Trump’s election has been greeted in Ankara with a mix of
schadenfreude and hope. “We were suffering from [American] policies
towards the Middle East and Turkey under the Democrats and Obama,” says
Yasin Aktay, a deputy chairman of the ruling Justice and Development
(AK) party. “This opens a new page.” The Turkish president has been even
more emphatic, calling protests against Mr Trump’s election in America
and Europe “a disrespect to democracy”.

Flattery may have gotten Mr Trump somewhere: according to Diken, a
Turkish news portal, he told Mr Erdogan over the phone that his
daughter, Ivanka, admired him. In any case, Turkey is giving him the
benefit of the doubt. For months, its government has pressed America to
extradite Fethullah Gulen, a Pennsylvania-based preacher whom Turkey
accuses of orchestrating a coup attempt in July that claimed some 270
lives. Turkish officials now believe Mr Trump will be more responsive to
such exhortations than Mrs Clinton would have been. (Her campaign
accepted donations from followers of Mr Gulen.) Mr Erdogan seems to
think that the president-elect, a fellow populist who has expressed
admiration for autocrats like Vladimir Putin, will look the other way as
he locks up opponents and panders to his Islamist base.He is not slowing down. Earlier this month AK tabled a bill pardoning
statutory rapists who marry their victims, before shelving it following
a popular outcry. Had it passed, the law would have allowed as many as
3,000 convicted sex offenders to walk free. That would have freed up
room inside Turkey’s teeming prisons for some of the 37,000 people,
including soldiers, bureaucrats, academics, journalists and a dozen
Kurdish MPs, who have been arrested for political reasons since the July
15th coup. Over 120,000 others, including nearly 16,000 last week
alone, have been sacked or suspended from office for alleged links to Mr
Gulen or the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK).Mr Trump is expected to nag foreigners less about human rights than
some American presidents have, though no one knows for sure. That would
suit Turkey just fine. Mr Erdogan respects Western interests, but not
Western norms. Last week he suggested that Turkey should join the
Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, a Eurasian political, economic and
military bloc that includes Uzbekistan, Russia and China, as an
alternative to the European Union.He may not be bluffing. Relations with the EU are worse than at any
point since it accepted Turkey as a candidate for membership, almost two
decades ago. Mr Erdogan has called for a referendum on ending Turkey’s
application in 2017. He has proposed reinstating the death penalty,
which would be incompatible with membership. And he has, ridiculously,
accused the West as a whole of siding with Islamic State (IS). His
foreign minister recently bragged about refusing to answer phone calls
from his German counterpart.The EU’s patience is starting to fray. Last week the European
Parliament voted to recommend suspending Turkey’s accession talks. The
vote is non-binding, and is unlikely to lead to anything: Germany fears
that a snubbed Turkey might scrap its agreement to block human-smuggling
across the Aegean Sea, allowing hundreds of thousands of migrants once
again to flow into Greece. But with Europe’s populist parties growing
stronger, and Mr Erdogan mobilising public opinion against the West, a
showdown will be hard to avert.If Turkey hopes to trade worsening relations with Europe for a new
friendship with Mr Trump, it will be disappointed. The new president may
be sympathetic to Turkish concerns about Mr Gulen, but then again he
may not. And in any case, the cleric’s fate rests with America’s courts.
Meanwhile, Mr Trump’s team wants to list the Muslim Brotherhood as a
terror group, roll back the nuclear deal with Iran, and continue arming
the PKK’s Syrian wing against IS. Mr Erdogan opposes all these measures
vehemently.Moreover, the officials named so far to the incoming administration
are no great fans of Mr Erdogan. Michael Flynn, Mr Trump’s pick for
national security adviser, penned an op-ed this month praising Turkey as
“a source of stability”, but Turkish officials were troubled to find
that a video shot on the night of the coup shows Mr Flynn cheering on
the mutinous generals against Mr Erdogan’s government. In a tweet posted
on the same date, Mr Trump’s choice for the head of the CIA, Mike
Pompeo, called Turkey an “Islamist dictatorship”. Some in Ankara are
already growing disillusioned. “This sounds like a crusader discourse,”
says Mr Aktay. The relationship between Mr Erdogan and Mr Trump has
gotten off to a good start. It may not last.

Anyone with
the capacity to remember facts for more than 8 seconds will already have
noticed how Trump's "policies" are nothing more than pieces of vomit
spewed up on Twitter resulting from the haphazard firing of his few
remaining functioning neurons. His infantile personality combined with
his total ignorance of practically every matter of importance means that
whatever he says can be disregarded. Trying to conjecture a future
real-world outcome based on Trump's blustering nonsense is an exercise
in futility.Erdogan will wander down the path of increasing nationalism a la
Putin et al while Trump will do the same thing in the USA. And we all
know where this leads us a few years down the road.

Perhaps the most positive thing to
emerge from the forthcoming Trump catastrophe may be the end of the USA
as we know it, from a geographical perspective. For years the USA has
been living off the educated "elites" on the West and East coasts. This
is where the innovation and job creation occurs and from where tax
dollars flow to more backward regressive states.Now that Trump is going to destroy trade, cause millions of jobs to
be lost, and cause the US dollar to collapse, there's very little reason
for the coasts to remain part of a wholly dysfunctional, racist,
backward, and inward-looking nation.Meanwhile Canada is a country of liberal principles in which people
are educated, less superstitious/religious, healthier, and happier. If
California, Oregon, and Washington hold successful ballot initiatives
over the next 24 months there's no reason why by 2020 we shouldn't have
the United States of Canada and the Backward States of America emerging
as two distinct nations. The former will be forward-looking, open,
dynamic, and meritocratic while the latter will be backward-looking,
closed, racist, stagnant, and based entirely around the politics of
influence. In the end it may well be the case that California shows the way, not
to a Democratic electoral victory at some distant and implausible time
in the future when the rest of the USA is less backward, racist,
ignorant, and insular but rather to a future in which educated
open-minded people decide to leave those who can't be saved in order to
get on with the serious business of building a better world.

An American flag was burned outside the White House after Donald J. Trump was elected president this month.Credit
Al Drago/The New York Times

WASHINGTON — Since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, politicians have periodically announced with fanfare that they would introduce a bill
to strip the citizenship of Americans accused of terrorism. The idea
tends to attract brief attention, but fades away, in part because the
Supreme Court long ago ruled that the Constitution does not permit the
government to take a person’s citizenship against his or her will.

But
on Tuesday, President-elect Donald J. Trump revived the idea and took
it much further than the extreme case of a suspected terrorist. He
proposed that Americans who protest government policies by burning the
flag could lose their citizenship — meaning, among other things, their
right to vote — as punishment.

Even
if Mr. Trump were to persuade Congress to enact a criminal statute, a
dramatic shift in the balance between government power and individual
freedom, anyone convicted and sentenced could point to clear Supreme
Court precedents to make the case for a constitutional violation.

The
obstacles include the precedent that the Constitution does not allow
the government to expatriate Americans against their will, through a
landmark 1967 case, Afroyim v. Rusk. They also include a 1989 decision, Texas v. Johnson,
in which the court struck down criminal laws banning flag burning,
ruling that the act was a form of political expression protected by the
First Amendment.

David D. Cole,
a Georgetown University law professor who co-wrote the Supreme Court
briefs in the flag-burning case and who is about to become national
legal director at the American Civil Liberties Union, said he wondered
if Mr. Trump’s strategy was to goad people into burning flags in order
to “marginalize” the protests against him. But he also called Mr.
Trump’s proposal “beyond the pale.”

“To
me it is deeply troubling that the person who is going to become the
most powerful government official in the United States doesn’t
understand the first thing about the First Amendment — which is you
can’t punish people for expressing dissent — and also doesn’t seem to
understand that citizenship is a constitutional right that cannot be
taken away, period, under any circumstances,” he said.

The
1967 case involving the stripping of citizenship traces back to a 1940
law that automatically revoked the citizenship of Americans who took
actions like voting in a foreign country’s election or joining its
military.

The
case centered on a man who had been born in Poland, became a
naturalized American citizen, and later went to Israel and voted in an
election there. When he subsequently tried to renew his American
passport, the State Department refused, saying he was no longer an
American citizen, and he sued.

In
a 5-to-4 ruling, the Supreme Court called citizenship and the rights
that stem from it “no light trifle to be jeopardized any moment” by
politicians’ attempts to curtail it. The court said that the 14th
Amendment, which guarantees due process of law, does not empower the
government to “rob” someone’s citizenship. Americans, the ruling
explained, can only lose their citizenship by voluntarily renouncing it.

“The
very nature of our free government makes it completely incongruous to
have a rule of law under which a group of citizens temporarily in office
can deprive another group of citizens of their citizenship,” Justice
Hugo L. Black wrote.

In a case in 1980, Vance v. Terrazas,
the Supreme Court extended that precedent by a vote of 6 to 3. That
case concerned a man who was born with both American and Mexican
citizenship, and who as a student took an oath of allegiance to Mexico,
renouncing his American citizenship in order to obtain a Mexican
citizenship document.

When
the State Department said he had thus surrendered his American
citizenship, he sued. The court majority said he was still a citizen
because the government had to prove that he specifically intended to
relinquish it, rather than having said those words with a different
motivation, like fulfilling his desire to obtain the certificate.

The
1989 flag-burning case was also decided by a vote of 5 to 4. It
centered on a protester who had burned a flag outside the 1984
Republican National Convention in Dallas as part of a political
demonstration against Reagan administration policies. The protester,
Gregory Johnson, was charged under a state law that criminalized
desecrating the flag and appealed his conviction.

The
majority ruled that Mr. Johnson’s act was symbolic speech protected by
the Constitution, effectively striking down state laws against flag
desecration across the country. In response, Congress swiftly enacted a
federal law against such desecration, but in 1990 the same five-justice
majority struck it down, too.

Just
one of the justices who participated in the flag-burning cases, Justice
Anthony M. Kennedy, is still on the court today; he sided with the
majority that struck down the bans. Justice Antonin Scalia, who died in
February and whose seat Mr. Trump will get to fill because Republican
senators refused to hold a hearing for President Obama’s nominee for the
vacancy, was also in the majority.

After
the 1989 decision, supporters of a flag-burning ban tried to enact an
amendment to the Constitution to make an exception to the First
Amendment, but it twice fell short in the Senate.

The issue flared again a decade ago. In 2005, Hillary Clinton, a senator from New York at that time, co-sponsored the Flag Protection Act.
Arguing that desecration of the symbol “may amount to fighting words or
a direct threat to the physical and emotional well-being” of onlookers,
the bill would have banned flag burning if abusing the symbol was
“intended to incite a violent response rather than make a political
statement.”

The
crafters of that bill sought to frame it as a compromise and an
alternative to an amendment, saying “the Bill of Rights is a guarantee
of those freedoms and should not be amended in a manner that could be
interpreted to restrict freedom, a course that is regularly resorted to
by authoritarian governments which fear freedom and not by free and
democratic nations.”

But
Congress did not act on the legislation. The following year, when the
Senate again tried to approve a constitutional amendment to empower
Congress to ban flag desecration and it fell one vote short of the necessary two-thirds majority, Mrs. Clinton was among those who voted against that measure.

Nov 25, 2016 5:06pm
by
Libby ShawThis outspoken bigoted, xenophobic, misogynist fascist who lost
the popular vote by two million and counting will never be my President.
Period. I will never accept the legitimacy of Trump’s Presidency. Nor
should any of us.

This is not about sore losing, sour grapes or the lack of a sense of humor after a devastating, stunning travesty of an electoral injustice. The egregious, dog whistling reality is that twice in my recent
lifetime the Electoral College and Supreme Court (in 2000) elected two
Presidents that clearly lost the popular vote. In 2000 Al Gore
won 500,000 votes over W. who, as we all well remember, is one of the
most destructive Presidents in recent U.S. history. We can hardly forget
what happened under W.’s watch. Two unfunded wars, tax cuts for the rich, at the expense of middle
and working class Americans, and a global financial meltdown that nearly
matched that of the Great Depression in 1929 dealt a crushing
economic blow to the majority of us. Hard working Americans lost their
jobs, their homes while their retirement savings accounts went poof! College
graduates in 2009 and 2010 had a tough time finding well paying jobs.
Jobs that could sustain them as the recent graduates struggled to pay
off their college loans. The lack of economic opportunities forced too
many college graduates to move back at home with their parents. Who, by
the way, also struggled during the bleak W. years of unpaid wars and tax
cuts for the 1%. Meanwhile the GOP’s donor class, the rich, got richer. Its wealth
never did trickle down to the lower masses, a Republican fraudulent myth
that has been promoted since the Reagan Administration. There is no way in hell that I will roll over and passively watch the ensuing nightmare that
is about to unfold. The right wing shit show ahead promises to be even
worse than anything W./Cheney visited upon we the wee ones during the
dark Bush years. I will not get over it because Trump is a fraud. He may be a favorite play thing and puppet for Vladimir Putin,
global oligarchs and U.S. warmongers, but he's no President of mine.
Trump lost over 2 million American votes. And counting.

You are an aberration and abomination who is willing to do and say
anything — no matter whom it aligns you with and whom it hurts — to
satisfy your ambitions.I don’t believe you care much at all about this country or your party
or the American people. I believe that the only thing you care about is
self-aggrandizement and self-enrichment. Your strongest allegiance is
to your own cupidity.I also believe that much of your campaign was an act of psychological
projection, as we are now learning that many of the things you slammed
Clinton for are things of which you may actually be guilty.

My sentiments exactly. And the real crook at hand turns out to be Trump, himself. Lock him up. Hillary Clinton leads by two million votes so far. But she is not our President. This should be appalling. We “sore losers” are literally terrified that Trump will make W. look
somewhat competent. There is already talk of dismantling Obamacare,
Medicare and Medicaid. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and
Dodd-Frank will soon be toast, no doubt. Wall Street will become a
venue for reckless gambling casinos all over again. And when the
casinos crash and burn, for they will, you and I will pick up the tab.And so it will go. Ironically and yes, sadly, Trump and U.S. House Speaker Ryan’s economic plans will punish Trump’s working class voters the most.

It is these very voters—less educated, struggling
to get by on low incomes—who will bear the brunt of unified Republican
government under Trump. The GOP Congress may give Trump his “infrastructure plan,” but that looks like it will consist of a bunch of tax cuts for investors to sink into toll bridges and toll roads. It will definitely give him the rest of his huge tax cuts, but those are skewed toward those at the top and won’t bring much relief to the “forgotten men and women of this country,” as he promised when campaigning. If the GOP repeals the Affordable Care Act, as it’s vowed to do
since it was enacted, many of these voters will lose their subsidized
health insurance. Block-granting Medicaid and privatizing Medicare will
dramatically increase these their economic insecurity. They’ll lose food stamps and Head Start slots. They’ll lose
access to reproductive health care. They can forget about a hike in
the federal minimum wage. According to one estimate, 20 million Trump voters will lose out on a big raise when Republicans kill Obama’s overtime rule. And if the GOP doesn’t get rid of it entirely, they’ll at least hobble the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau,
which reined in the kind of predatory lending schemes that often
indenture the working poor. It’ll be death by a thousand cuts.

Trump will not bring back working class jobs. Technologies will
continue to do the work of humans in most factories. For
unfettered capitalism thrives on personal greed for those at the
top. Jobs will continue to be outsourced to countries that exploit
cheap labor. Coal mines will continue with strip mining and mountaintop
removal that requires fewer workers than under the ground mining. CEO’s
will continue to receive huge bonuses on the backs of their employees.
Libertarian billionaires like the Koch boys will continue to influence
the destruction of labor unions that once protected workers. There will be no doubt some voter’s remorse pretty
soon when folks realize Trump conned them. We should not demonize
these voters. No one can blame anyone for voting to climb out of
minimum wage jobs, poverty and the misery it brings. Unfortunately, a
bait and switch con artist should not have been the struggling working
class’s main man. Donald Trump is correct when he bleated “the election is rigged.” That it is. It is rigged for Trump, thanks to the Electoral College. Our Founding Fathers apparently implemented this system in order to protect slavery in 1787 and 1803.

Standard civics-class accounts of the Electoral College rarely
mention the real demon dooming direct national election in 1787 and
1803: slavery.

Right. As in when the South fought the civil war in order to protect
slavery. Slavery as in some human beings literally owning other human
beings is thankfully gone. The Electoral College should have been
abolished along with slavery since its original goal was to protect
human enslavement.

If the system’s pro-slavery tilt was not overwhelmingly obvious when
the Constitution was ratified, it quickly became so. For 32 of the
Constitution’s first 36 years, a white slaveholding Virginian occupied
the presidency.Southerner Thomas Jefferson, for example, won the election of 1800-01
against Northerner John Adams in a race where the slavery-skew of the
electoral college was the decisive margin of victory: without the
extra electoral college votes generated by slavery, the mostly southern
states that supported Jefferson would not have sufficed to give him a
majority. As pointed observers remarked at the time, Thomas
Jefferson metaphorically rode into the executive mansion on the backs of
slaves.

And the press usually takes a stance that the new
administration at least deserves to have a chance to get started - a
honeymoon period. But these are not normal times. This is not about tax
policy, health care, or education - even though all those and more are
so important. This is about racism, bigotry, intimidation and the
specter of corruption.

Like most members of this community the outcome of this election all
but destroyed me. My husband I reeled in shock, unable to eat for two
days. I skipped a class that I take at Rice University. I cancelled a
swimming date with a friend on Wednesday. Both of us were afraid we’d
sink to the bottom of the 7’ deep pool and never re-emerge. My
siblings, relatives and friends from New York City to Seattle are
still speechless. Some of us among Texas bloggers were too shocked to
write for several days after the election. It took me over two weeks.
When I learned that a few Catholic members of my large family voted for
Trump b/c the right to lifers got to them, I wanted to scream. When I visited my mother in Cincinnati days after the election I saw
Trump/Pence and Choose Life signs in too many yards. These are
neighborhoods with a large Catholic population. My mother knows that her
daughters are highly upset with her. Our Catholic mother is 91 years
old. I had to say “No one will blame you for voting for your religion,
Mom.” She hated voting for Trump, she admitted, but she felt she had to
because of abortion. I sucked it up and hid my tears out of love and
respect for our mother. None of us felt so hopelessly ravaged before because we know this
election has gone terribly wrong. We didn’t lose to a McCain, Romney,
Jeb Bush or John Kasich. Though we would have been distraught and
disappointed, we could have moved on because these men don’t terrify
us. But we “lost” (not) to a plain spoken hate master, bigot, misogynist,
xenophobic, self-serving narcissist and fascist instead. Who
essentially said a President can do anything he wants and get away with it. As if he is a King or CEO. Moving on and getting over it are not viable options.Playing the blame game at this point in time is counter
productive. No more talk about Bernie vs. Hillary. We are well past
this point in the political dialogue. We are down to the basic survival
of our country’s democratic process. Citizen bloggers like me and members of our community must
continue our activism, no matter the challenges. Our local Democratic
Parties must stay focused on and shout out about the forthcoming abuses
of power as well as an era of unsurpassed government kleptocracy and
intimidation. We should make sure to donate to organizations such as the
ACLU, Planned Parenthood, the NAACP and the Southern Poverty Law Center.
For these are groups that can put the legal brakes on the right wing
shit show that lies ahead.

But as I stand I do not despair, because I believe the vast
majority of Americans stand with me. To all those in Congress of both
political parties, to all those in the press, to religious and civic
leaders around the country. your voices must be heard. I hope that the
President-elect can learn to rise above this and see the dangers that
are brewing. If he does and speaks forcibly, and with action, we should
be ready to welcome his voice. But of course I am deeply worried that
his selections of advisors and cabinet posts suggests otherwise.

​Birds of a feather flock together. Trump has chosen three
white supremacists to serve in his government so far. Non-Christians
have much to fear in a Trump administration, as well.

To all of you I say, stay vigilant. The great Martin Luther King, Jr.
knew that even as a minority, there was strength in numbers in fighting
tyranny. Holding hands and marching forward, raising your voice above
the din of complacency, can move mountains. And in this case, I believe
there is a vast majority who wants to see this nation continue in
tolerance and freedom. But it will require speaking. Engage in your
civic government. Flood newsrooms or TV networks with your calls if you
feel they are slipping into the normalization of extremism. Donate your
time and money to causes that will fight to protect our liberties.

Many of us became political activists during the Bush
Administrations. The results of the 2000 (stolen) election had stung so
many of us to the core. In my case, while working for a private
academic institution in Houston, a colleague courageously sent an email
to those whom she thought would be open to serving as grassroots
activist watch dogs of the Bush Administration. Sarah had reserved a
conference room on campus and about 30 of us met there for a couple of
hours. We met once a month. Sarah and another colleague are well
seasoned organizers (supporters of the former Kucinich progressive
movement) and they got us started. We joined our neighborhood’s
Democratic clubs and Civic Clubs. If we had kids we ran for PTO school
board posts. We became voter deputy registrars in our home counties. We
joined forces with our local party as well as with Battleground TX in
2014. Some of us are bloggers. We know how to use social media. The
good news in this ongoing horror show is that Hillary swept
Houston/Harris Co. The Tea Party has been put to bed. For now. The fight never ends especially for those of us who live in
Republican controlled states. The US government is about to become
another Koch boy owned Kansas if we don’t fight back. The battle ahead is like none other so far. We are
literally fighting for our basic democratic rights as well as for our
country’s future. I must add, in the sixteen years that I have served as a political
activist I never cease to be amazed by voters who will routinely vote
against their best interests. I understand how it happens (right wing
media, online fake news sites, religious beliefs, dog whistles, the
fear, the evil doing “other” cards) but what will it take, finally, to
wake folks up? And when will hard working Americans end their romanticization and worship of billionaires like Trump?
Billionaires like Trump don’t give a damn about anyone but
themselves. Nor will Trump, et al allow their vast wealth to trickle
down to a bunch of “undeserving, dumb morons” who are poor and lazy.
Former President Ronald Reagan’s demonization of the “welfare queens” is
still in play within the Republican Party.

Trump falsely claims 'millions of people who voted illegally' cost him popular vote

Story highlights

Trump won the Electoral College

But he trails Clinton in the popular vote by about two million

Washington (CNN)President-elect
Donald Trump alleged Sunday, without evidence, that "millions of
people" voted illegally for Hillary Clinton and otherwise he would have
won the popular vote. It's an unprecedented allegation by a
president-elect.

Trump won the
Electoral College and thus the White House, but the Democratic nominee
leads him in the popular vote by about two million ballots.

"In
addition to winning the Electoral College in a landslide, I won the
popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally,"
Trump tweeted.

"It would have been much
easier for me to win the so-called popular vote than the Electoral
College in that I would only campaign in 3 or 4- states instead of the
15 states that I visited. I would have won even more easily and
convincingly (but smaller states are forgotten)!" he added.

This is the first time he has alleged voter fraud in his own victory and there is no evidence of any widespread voter fraud.

Trump
could be referencing a series of fake stories on conspiracy websites
that said he actually beat Clinton in the popular vote count. Trump's
transition team did not return requests for comment Sunday afternoon.

He
later added: "Serious voter fraud in Virginia, New Hampshire and
California - so why isn't the media reporting on this? Serious bias -
big problem!"

Recount efforts

Trump
has been railing over the weekend against a recount effort led by the
Green Party, that he has dubbed a "scam." Green Party officials filed for a recount in Wisconsin on Friday
after reports of possible voting discrepancies in areas that used paper
ballots versus those where electronic voting took place.

Wisconsin
Green Party co-chairman George Martin said the party is seeking a
"reconciliation of paper records" -- a request that could go further
than a simple recount, possibly spurring an investigation into the
integrity of Wisconsin's voting system. "This is a process, a first step
to examine whether our electoral democracy is working," Martin said.

Election Recounts 2016: 5 Fast Facts You Need to Know

The 2016 presidential election recounts are about to begin, plunging an already chaotic election into more scenes of drama.Now that Green Party nominee Jill Stein has raised
more than $6 million for recounts in three battleground states –
Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania – it looks likely that they will
happen.Stein formally requested a recount in Wisconsin first because that
state’s deadline was on November 25. On November 26, Democratic Party
nominee Hillary Clinton’s campaign said she would join the Wisconsin
effort, which starts next week, and will possibly join subsequent
recounts in Pennsylvania and Michigan. Meanwhile, the Obama
administration is defending the election results, according to Politico,
saying, “it has seen no evidence of hackers tampering with the 2016
presidential election” and adding, “We stand behind our election
results, which accurately reflect the will of the American people.” Stein has telegraphed her intentions to also seek recounts in
Michigan and Pennsylvania, and she wrote on her fundraising website that
she had raised enough money as of November 26 to fund the Pennsylvania
recount too; the deadline for filing for a recount in Pennsylvania is
November 28, and the deadline in Michigan is November 30.Unprocessed ballots in the 2016 presidential race were still being
counted as of November 26, especially in populous blue California,
although they won’t change the Electoral College math because Clinton
already won that state. According to the Cook Political Report, here are the popular vote election results:

Clinton: 64,637,503Trump: 62,409,389Others: 7,190,133

Trump leads in the swing states by a popular vote margin of 22,171,924 to 21,342,561, according to Cook Political Report. That gave Trump his
Electoral College victory of 306-232. Clinton would win the Electoral
College if she flipped Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania into her
column but – underscoring the immense difficulty of the task – she would
need all three states.Even her own campaign lawyer acknowledges the challenge, noting that
no recount has overturned a presidential vote total even as large as
Michigan’s, the tightest of the three states. For his part, after initially staying silent about the Stein recount
crusade, Trump, who prevailed in all three states and criticized the
election as rigged before he won it, has decried
the recount efforts as a “scam,” pointing out that Clinton has already
conceded. Some others have also criticized Stein for what they see as a
money-wasting quixotic effort; her vote total in Michigan surpassed
Trump’s margin, and some believe the stronger presence of third-party
candidates hurt Clinton this election year (with Stein and Gary Johnson
playing the Ralph Nader role).Here’s what you need to know:

1. Wisconsin’s Recount Will Proceed Next Week but the Other Two State Recounts Haven’t Formally Been Requested Yet

The three states share a lot in common: They were part of a
Midwestern narrative of white working class voters with economic angst
shifting to Trump, while Clinton did not rally urban support to the
degree Barack Obama had. The three states had not voted for a Republican
for president since the 1980s, although Wisconsin has a GOP governor.
Pennsylvania elected a slate of Democratic officials to statewide
positions while also electing Trump.Wisconsin’s Election Commission released a statement saying that it
had received Stein’s request for a recount as well as one from Reform
Party nominee Roque “Rocky” De La Fuente. Wisconsin has until December 13 to complete its recount and is still estimating costs and how they will be charged to campaigns.The Wisconsin Election Commission “is preparing to move forward with a
statewide recount of votes for President of the United States,”
Administrator Michael Haas said in a written statement on November 25, the recount deadline.The deadline to seek a recount is November 30 in Michigan. Michigan conducts
automatic recounts in elections with margins of less than 2,000 votes
(not the case here), but allows any candidate to request one if the
candidate “believes that the canvass of the votes cast on the office may
be incorrect because of possible ‘fraud or mistake’ in the precinct
returns may petition for a recount of the votes cast in the precincts
involved.”Pennsylvania’s recount deadline is November 28. The state is unique
in lacking a paper trail for its voting. Pensylvania’s election has the
largest margin, and, with 20 electoral votes, the state is also the
largest prize of the three.

A
Wisconsin recount will occur into 2016 presidential election results
that showed a Donald Trump victory over Hillary Clinton after the Green
Party's Jill Stein filed for one after crowdfunding millions.

2. Clinton’s Campaign Says It Investigated Allegations of Outside Interference in the Election but Found Nothing Actionable

Clinton let Stein drive the recount train until November 26, the day
after a recount was granted in Wisconsin. Clinton’s campaign lawyer,
Marc Elias, then penned
a widely quoted post on Medium.com that said Clinton’s campaign had
vetted the election’s integrity and found no actionable evidence of
outside interference in the election.But Elias wrote that Clinton would now participate in recounts,
saying, “It should go without saying that we take these concerns
extremely seriously. We certainly understand the heartbreak felt by so
many who worked so hard to elect Hillary Clinton, and it is a
fundamental principle of our democracy to ensure that every vote is
properly counted.”Elias noted, “This election cycle was unique in the degree of foreign
interference witnessed throughout the campaign: the U.S. government
concluded that Russian state actors were behind the hacks of the
Democratic National Committee and the personal email accounts of Hillary
for America campaign officials, and just yesterday, the Washington Post
reported that the Russian government was behind much of the ‘fake news’
propaganda that circulated online in the closing weeks of the
election.”

ON ELECTION DAY, when polls suggested Donald Trump was headed for defeat, the candidate loudly questioned the integrity of the process, arguing on Fox News that reported problems with electronic voting machines made it impossible to be sure that the results would be fair.

Just 12 hours later, after projections showed him narrowly winning
Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan, and hence the electoral college,
Trump made no mention of his qualms about the voting machines in his
victory speech.

Despite Trump’s sudden lack of outrage at what he had previously
called evidence of “a rigged system,” he is now ideally positioned to
clear away the doubts he helped to amplify about the votes cast and
counted on those poorly secured computers.
He can do so simply by acting on his legal right to demand and pay for
recounts in the three states that swung the election, to ensure that the
vote count was not distorted by any accidental computer glitches or
intentional malware infections.While Trump often casts himself as a victim of powerful forces
conspiring against him — like news organizations, the Internal Revenue
Service, or the cast of “Hamilton” — his standing as the winning
candidate endows him with the unimpeachable authority to demand
recounts, to see if the rigging he complained of really took place.A comprehensive audit of the vote was suggested on Wednesday by Alex Halderman, a respected researcher in computer security at the University of Michigan who explained on Medium
that he has approached Hillary Clinton’s campaign with a persuasive
case for at least double-checking the results in those critical states.“We’ve been pointing out for years that voting machines are
computers, and they have reprogrammable software, so if attackers can
modify that software by infecting the machines with malware, they can
cause the machines to give any answer whatsoever,” Halderman wrote.
“I’ve demonstrated this in the laboratory with real voting machines
— in just a few seconds, anyone can install vote-stealing malware on
those machines that silently alters the electronic records of every
vote.”

In 2006, researchers at Princeton, including Alex
Halderman, showed how easy it would be to infect an electronic voting
machine with vote-stealing malware.

As Halderman argued, although there is no evidence that any such
hacking took place in the Trump-Clinton contest, there is broad
agreement among security experts that election results provided by
computers should be routinely audited: by looking at paper records of votes, where those exist, or examining the machines themselves for signs of tampering.

The case for doing so this year would appear to be strengthened by
widespread consensus in the U.S. intelligence community that hackers
directed by the Russian government were working against Clinton, by stealing emails from Democratic party officials and providing them to WikiLeaks.

But even though Wisconsin and Michigan, and several Pennsylvania
counties, “predominately use optical scan paper ballots, which can be
examined to confirm that the computer voting machines produced an
accurate count,” Halderman noted that no American state “is planning to
actually check the paper in a way that would reliably detect that the
computer-based outcome was wrong.”

For that reason, he and other experts argue, at least one of the
candidates in the presidential election should exercise their right to
request recounts. Given that Clinton spent the final weeks of the campaign criticizing
Trump for hedging on whether or not he would accept the results, it
would be hard for her to do this, despite having received over two
million more votes than Trump nationwide.Although Jill Stein indicated on Wednesday that she would request recounts in those three states, she needs to first raise $2.5 million
to pay for them by Friday, the deadline for making such a request in
Wisconsin, where Trump’s margin over Clinton is less than 23,000 votes.

It is important to realize that there is a clear, non-partisan case
for post-election audits of voting machines to be routine, rather than
exceptional, and that there are alternatives to full recounts. As Ron
Rivest an M.I.T. cryptographer, and Philip Stark, a professor of
statistics at Berkeley, explained in USA Today
last week, carrying out what’s known as a “risk-limiting” audit, in
which a random sample of just 1 percent of the paper ballots cast would
be examined, “could give 95% confidence that the results are correct in
every state.”But since there is no legal procedure in place to do such an audit of
this year’s results, at least one of the candidates should take action
to dispel the kind of doubts about ghosts in the machines Trump
expressed on election day, which only grow with each viral anecdote of
computer malfunction. “Examining the physical evidence in these states — even if it finds
nothing amiss — will help allay doubt and give voters justified
confidence that the results are accurate,” Halderman argued. “It will
also set a precedent for routinely examining paper ballots, which will
provide an important deterrent against cyberattacks on future
elections.”

Just in case, the State of Michigan is preparing for a recount of nearly 4.8 million votes cast in the 2016 presidential race.Jill
Stein, the Green Party candidate for president, has raised more than
$5 million to pay for recounts in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan.
She filed a formal recount request Friday afternoon with the Wisconsin
Elections Commission and faces a Monday deadline in Pennsylvania and
Wednesday in Michigan.►Related: Jill Stein files for recount in WisconsinA recount won’t be cheap, and it will be a monumental task for the Secretary of State and 83 county clerks around Michigan.She
can’t request a recount in Michigan until the vote is certified, which
is scheduled to happen at 2 p.m. Monday, when the Board of Canvassers
meets to make the results — which show Republican Donald Trump with a
10,704-vote lead over Democrat Hillary Clinton — official. After the
certification, she has until Wednesday afternoon to make the recount
request.►Related: Michigan elections director casts doubt on vote-hacking concerns
►Related: The numbers are in: Trump wins Michigan by 10,704“What
we’re doing is standing up for an election system that we can trust. We
deserve to have votes that we can believe in,” she said in a video on
her Facebook page. “This is a commitment that Greens have expressed that
we stand for election integrity, that we support voting systems that
respect our vote. We demand voting systems that are accurate, that are
publicly controlled, that are not privatized.”Her campaign
manager, David Cobb, said the recount request in all three states is a
given because of: Michigan's close election results; the fact that the
vast majority of pre-election and exit polls in the state showed a lead
for Clinton; and that there was a significant under-vote on Nov. 8, when
an estimated 85,000 people cast ballots but did not make a selection in
the presidential race."It is great that there are paper ballots
in Michigan, but the only way to confirm the results is to do an audit
or a recount," Cobb said.The state has some experience with
statewide election recounts, although not in nearly five decades, said
Chris Thomas, director of elections at the Secretary of State office.
One was done after one of Soapy Williams' races for governor, as well as
the daylight saving time vote in 1968, when voters rejected the issue
by 490 votes. Voters passed daylight saving time when it came back to
the ballot in 1972.“Our plans are being drafted,” Thomas said. “We’re on top of it. We’ve got some blueprints on how it will be done.”If
a recount happens, all the ballots — all 4,799,284 presidential race
votes — will be counted by hand at the county level under state
supervision. It’s a process that Thomas said will happen quickly. It has
to be done before the 16 members of Michigan's electoral college meet
on Dec. 19 to cast their votes for the winner of the presidential race.“We’re fast,” he said. “We do all of our state recounts by hand.”And
it will be expensive. Under laws passed in Michigan in 2014, which are
intended to make it more difficult to recall lawmakers, recounts are
costly for the people requesting them. When the margin of the race is
more than 0.5%, the cost to recount is $125 per precinct. There are
6,300 precincts in Michigan, which translates into a whopping recount
price tag of $787,500.► Related: What you should know about Betsy DeVos, Trump’s education sec. pick► Related: Ben Carson mulls Donald Trump's offer to be HUD secretarySince
Stein got only 51,643 votes in Michigan compared with more than 4.5
million for Trump and Clinton combined, the cost per precinct for Stein
would be $125 because her margin is not within 0.5%. If Clinton had
asked for a recount, her cost would be $25 per precinct because she lost
by such a slim margin. Stein also has estimated that she needs to raise
several million for legal costs.Stein said she’s not requesting the recount because she thinks it will change the outcome.“This
initiative is not about helping one candidate and hurting another,” she
said. “We said over and over, we don’t support either of them. In this
recount effort, we’re not attempting to overthrow Donald Trump, and I
don’t expect that will be the outcome.”Instead, she said she picked the three states where the vote was the closest to ensure the integrity of the election.“We
don’t have a smoking gun that there was voter fraud going on here,” she
said. “But we do not have to prove that there was fraud to justify the
need for a voting system that we have confidence in.”Scott
Hagerstrom, director of Trump's campaign in Michigan, said he's
confident in the presidential tally in the state. But if a recount does
occur, the campaign will have a significant presence in watching the
recount."I’ve been involved in some recounts in the past. And you
want to make sure you have representation there and make sure the
proper procedures are followed," he said.People in Michigan are
clamoring to help. A request from Stein for volunteers to be observers
during a recount in the state elicited hundreds of responses in the last
two days.The prospect for fraud in Michigan’s voting system is
unlikely because the system is not connected to the Internet, and the
state does operate with paper ballots that can be recounted, state
election officials said.Contact Kathleen Gray: 313-223-4430, kgray99@freepress.com or on Twitter @michpoligal.

Spill details on Russia hack: Gabriel Schoenfeld

Gabriel Schoenfeld
2:32 p.m. EST November 21, 2016

Retaliation is a bad idea, but Obama should order a full accounting before Trump takes the oath.

In
his remaining time in office, perhaps the most difficult decision
President Obama will face is how the United States should respond to the
stunning Russian cyberattack on our electoral system: the penetration
of Democratic National Committee servers and the email account of John Podesta, Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman.For
an extraordinary reason, this is not something Obama can leave to his
successor. Donald Trump, despite having received classified briefings on the Russian cyber threat,
has refused to accept the intelligence community’s judgment that such
an attack took place. His most notable public comment about it came at
the second debate with Hillary Clinton, where he tossed a word salad of
doubt over the matter: “Maybe there is no hacking,” Trump said, “but
they always blame Russia.”If Obama does not act in his final weeks, it is a virtual certainty that
President Trump will not act either. As the beneficiary of the hacking,
and as an admirer of Russian strongman Vladimir Putin, Trump would have every reason to let it slide.Options for a response have already been outlined in a paper that has
made its way to Obama’s desk. They are, of course, top secret, but last
month Vice President Biden told NBC’s Meet the Press that we would be “sending a message” to Putin, one that “will be at the time of our choosing, and under the circumstances that will have the greatest impact.”That was tough talk, but an unfortunate axiom applies to Obama administration
pronouncements: the tougher the talk, the lower the likelihood
commensurate action will follow. That rule is especially likely to
pertain in this instance because all the imaginable options are so
unattractive.

Among
other capabilities, the Pentagon’s cyber command or the CIA's Center
for Cyber Intelligence could send signals into Russian computers that
could wreak destruction. Already back in the Cold War, the CIA planted “Trojan horse” computer chips
in turbine technology the KGB was stealing from the West to control the
flow of natural gas in Siberian pipelines. When the doctored chips
performed their special task, the largest non-nuclear explosion ever
seen from outer space was the result celebrated in CIA headquarters in Langley, Va.The way the world is wired today, we could undoubtedly repeat such a
feat with the right sequence of key strokes on a laptop in Langley,
causing major pieces of Russia’s infrastructure to fail
catastrophically. But the Russians could retaliate just as easily, and
they probably would. Given how computerized our economy is, we stand to
lose a lot more than we would gain from engaging in such kinetic action.
Mutual assured destruction applies to the cyber age just as it did (and
does) in the nuclear age.A non-kinetic alternative, already much discussed, is to make public
some portion of the enormous trove of documents the CIA undoubtedly
possesses that demonstrate massive corruption by Putin and his cronies.
This would have some salutary consequences. But every Russian already
knows that the denizens of the Kremlin have pillaged the country’s
treasure for personal gain. The trouble is, Russia is not a democracy
and there is nothing its citizens can do about it. The major effect of
such a U.S. action would be to induce a collective yawn.Indictments? Sanctions? Both have been employed in response to past
bouts of North Korean and Chinese hacking, and both would induce more
yawns. Moreover, whatever punitive economic measures Obama puts in place
today, President Trump could reverse on Jan. 20. Unless we settle for
engaging in some petty retaliatory hacking of little moment, it would
seem that we’re out of tricks. Indeed, given Biden’s swaggering threat,
we might be witnessing a repeat of the Syrian chemical weapons fiasco in
which Obama drew a red line, Syria promptly crossed the red line, and
Obama — contemplating the unknown cost of launching a military operation
— chickened out and said sorry, never mind. Still, even if there is no effective means of retaliation, there remains
one thing that Obama absolutely must do, though it comes at a price.

POLICING THE USA: A look at race, justice, mediaThe Russia-WikiLeaks assault on our electoral process was one of the
most consequential influence operations in modern history. The public
deserves a full accounting of exactly what happened. The intelligence
community should lay out what it knows. Even if this means disclosing
sensitive sources and methods, a timeline, a list of players and a
description of the technology involved, and any and all relevant
evidence should be put into the public domain in a report prepared and
signed by trusted blue-ribbon names.The stakes here
could not be higher. If we do not obtain a documented account before
Inauguration Day of what we have just witnessed, the incoming Trump
administration will have every incentive to erase the evidentiary trail
and bury the truth. Trump has exhibited no compunctions about falsifying
far more trivial things. His designated national security adviser,
retired general Michael Flynn, is a brazen Putinophile who has taken
money from RT, Moscow’s principal English-language propaganda organ. Flynn will only be too happy to go along.As
we draw closer to the moment Trump takes the oath of office, the
American people deserve an accounting that clears up as thoroughly as
possible all questions about one of the many extraordinary aspects of
the 2016 presidential campaign: how a candidate favored by Russia, and
who favors Russia, was helped by Russia to ascend to the most powerful
position in the world.Gabriel Schoenfeld, a member of USA TODAY's Board of Contributors, is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and the author of Necessary Secrets: National Security, the Media, and the Rule of Law. Follow him on Twitter: @gabeschoenfeldYou can read diverse opinions from our Board of Contributors and other writers on the Opinion front page, on Twitter @USATOpinion and in our daily Opinion newsletter. To submit a letter, comment or column, check our submission guidelines.
16649
CONNECTTWEET
15
LINKEDIN
29
COMMENTEMAIL

The Right Way to Resist Trump

By LUIGI ZINGALESNOV. 18, 2016

Five years ago, I warned about the risk of a Donald J. Trump presidency. Most people laughed. They thought it inconceivable.

I
was not particularly prescient; I come from Italy, and I had already
seen this movie, starring Silvio Berlusconi, who led the Italian
government as prime minister for a total of nine years between 1994 and
2011. I knew how it could unfold.

Now
that Mr. Trump has been elected president, the Berlusconi parallel
could offer an important lesson in how to avoid transforming a
razor-thin victory into a two-decade affair. If you think presidential
term limits and Mr. Trump’s age could save the country from that fate,
think again. His tenure could easily turn into a Trump dynasty.

Mr.
Berlusconi was able to govern Italy for as long as he did mostly thanks
to the incompetence of his opposition. It was so rabidly obsessed with
his personality that any substantive political debate disappeared; it
focused only on personal attacks, the effect of which was to increase
Mr. Berlusconi’s popularity. His secret was an ability to set off a
Pavlovian reaction among his leftist opponents, which engendered
instantaneous sympathy in most moderate voters. Mr. Trump is no
different.

We
saw this dynamic during the presidential campaign. Hillary Clinton was
so focused on explaining how bad Mr. Trump was that she too often didn’t
promote her own ideas, to make the positive case for voting for her.
The news media was so intent on ridiculing Mr. Trump’s behavior that it
ended up providing him with free advertising.

Unfortunately,
the dynamic has not ended with the election. Shortly after Mr. Trump
gave his acceptance speech, protests sprang up all over America. What
are these people protesting against? Whether we like it or not, Mr.
Trump won legitimately. Denying that only feeds the perception that
there are “legitimate” candidates and “illegitimate” ones, and a small
elite decides which is which. If that’s true, elections are just a
beauty contest among candidates blessed by the Guardian Council of
clerics, just like in Iran.

These
protests are also counterproductive. There will be plenty of reasons to
complain during the Trump presidency, when really awful decisions are
made. Why complain now, when no decision has been made? It delegitimizes
the future protests and exposes the bias of the opposition.

Even
the petition calling for members of the Electoral College to violate
their mandate and not vote for Mr. Trump could play into the
president-elect’s hands. This idea is misguided. What ground would we
then have to stand on when Mr. Trump tricks the system to obtain what he
wants?

Have you changed anything in your daily life since the
election? For example, have you tried to understand opposing points of
view, donated to a group, or contacted your member of Congress? Your
answer may be included in a follow up post.

The
Italian experience provides a blueprint for how to defeat Mr. Trump.
Only two men in Italy have won an electoral competition against Mr.
Berlusconi: Romano Prodi and the current prime minister, Matteo Renzi
(albeit only in a 2014 European election). Both of them treated Mr.
Berlusconi as an ordinary opponent. They focused on the issues, not on
his character. In different ways, both of them are seen as outsiders,
not as members of what in Italy is defined as the political caste.

The
Democratic Party should learn this lesson. It should not do as the
Republicans did after President Obama was elected. Their preconceived
opposition to any of his initiatives poisoned the Washington well,
fueling the anti-establishment reaction (even if it was a successful
electoral strategy for the party). There are plenty of Trump proposals
that Democrats can agree with, like new infrastructure investments. Most
Democrats, including politicians like Mrs. Clinton and Bernie Sanders
and economists like Lawrence Summers and Paul Krugman, have pushed the
idea of infrastructure as a way to increase demand and to expand
employment among non-college-educated workers. Some details might be
different from a Republican plan, but it will add credibility to the
Democratic opposition if it tries to find the points in common, not just
differences.

And
an opposition focused on personality would crown Mr. Trump as the
people’s leader of the fight against the Washington caste. It would also
weaken the opposition voice on the issues, where it is important to
conduct a battle of principles.

Democrats
should also offer Mr. Trump help against the Republican establishment,
an offer that would reveal whether his populism is empty language or a
real position. For example, with Mr. Trump’s encouragement, the Republican platform called for reinstating the Glass-Steagall Act, which would separate investment and commercial banking.
The Democrats should declare their support of this separation, a policy
that many Republicans oppose. The last thing they should want is for
Mr. Trump to use the Republican establishment as a fig leaf for his own
failure, dumping on it the responsibility for blocking the popular
reforms that he promised during the campaign and probably never intended
to pass. That will only enlarge his image as a hero of the people
shackled by the elites.

Finally,
the Democratic Party should also find a credible candidate among young
leaders, one outside the party’s Brahmins. The news that Chelsea Clinton
is considering running for office
is the worst possible. If the Democratic Party is turning into a
monarchy, how can it fight the autocratic tendencies in Mr. Trump?

Luigi Zingales, a professor
of entrepreneurship and finance at the Booth School of Business at the
University of Chicago, is the author of “A Capitalism for the People:
Recapturing the Lost Genius of American Prosperity.”

Yes Betty, either or it seems he wanted to fly only with
Singapore Airways.

Boeing or Airbus, it’s just the same
isn’t it? Aren’t they both just fat birds with 500 passengers?

Yes, but Singapore Airlines has the
most beautiful airhostesses: delicate, fine, graceful…Mr. Tigerli had looked forward to the flight
so much!

So the little man was disappointed?

You just can’t imagine how disappointed
he was.

But thank God one of the hostesses was a
pretty Chinese girl. Mr. Tigerli purred loudly but she didn’t hear him because
the purring of the Airbus 380 was even louder.

The poor cat!

You’ve said it Betty. Mr. Tigerli was
in a very bad mood and asked me for a loud speaker.

I’m sure you can get one in 1st
Class.

“”Russian Girl” had even heard you over
the roar of the Niagara Falls” I said to Mr. Tigerli. “You are a very
unfaithful cat. You wanted to get to know Asiatic girls. That’s how it is when
one leaves one’s first love”.

And what did he say to that?

“Men are hunters” was his answer.

Yes, my dear cat, a mouse hunter. And
what else did he say?

Not another word. He behaved as if he
hadn’t heard me.

The Airbus is very loud.

I told him shortly “Don’t trouble
yourself about “Chinese Girl”. There will be enough even prettier girls in
China. Wait till we land in Guilin”.

About Me

Betty MacDonald Fan Club, founded by Wolfgang Hampel, has members in 40 countries.
Wolfgang Hampel, author of Betty MacDonald biography interviewed Betty MacDonald's family and friends. His Interviews have been published on CD and DVD by Betty MacDonald Fan Club. If you are interested in the Betty MacDonald Biography or the Betty MacDonald Interviews send us a mail, please.
Several original Interviews with Betty MacDonald are available.
We are also organizing international Betty MacDonald Fan Club Events for example, Betty MacDonald Fan Club Eurovision Song Contest Meetings in Oslo and Düsseldorf, Royal Wedding Betty MacDonald Fan Club Event in Stockholm and Betty MacDonald Fan Club Fifa Worldcup Conferences in South Africa and Germany.
Betty MacDonald Fan Club Honour Members are Monica Sone, author of Nisei Daughter and described as Kimi in Betty MacDonald's The Plague and I, Betty MacDonald's nephew, artist and writer Darsie Beck, Betty MacDonald fans and beloved authors and artists Gwen Grant, Letizia Mancino, Perry Woodfin, Traci Tyne Hilton, Tatjana Geßler, music producer Bernd Kunze, musician Thomas Bödigheimer, translater Mary Holmes and Mr. Tigerli.